Why local government reorganisations keep failing - Yorkshire Post Letters

I am dismayed at your leading article in The Yorkshire Post (February 19) on local government reorganisation and devolution. The article parrots IPPR’s press release on this topic.

The IPPR is a think-tank. In other words a collection of thinkers and scribblers who might sometimes make valid comments but who are never tested by the real business of actually running anything. They have no bold new take on how England's local government should be organised, or on the extent to which funding and responsibility should be devolved to various types and levels of local or regional bodies.

They're fond of pushing fluffy-sounding ideas like ‘subsidiarity’ and ‘double devolution’ because apparently these bring power closer to the people and therefore enhance democracy whereas to my ears these sound like a recipe for a surplus of mediocre politicians and councillors battling constantly for funding between towns, cities, and rural areas, and ‘combined authorities’.

Nobody has produced a workable blueprint explaining the new structures (Mayoral Strategic Authorities staffed by councillors nominated from the underlying counties, unitaries and boroughs). Nobody has justified the decades-long musical chairs whereby areas such as Lincolnshire have first been split up into various boroughs and unitaries, only to be re-combined into a Mayoral Strategic Authority (MSA - in this case a Combined County Authority) to be called ‘Greater Lincolnshire’.

‘Counties’ such as Cleveland, Avon, West Midlands have come and gone, with vast expense and disruption each time. The stumbling block, since the never-ending and repeatedly failed reorganisations were begun by accountants and statisticians in the late 60s, has always been the counties.

Counties are adorable ancient geographic areas which should have been kept as ceremonial entities but completely distinct from local government power, funding and administration.

We need bold leaders who can re-instate the England county map from 1900 as a purely geographic overlay but with local government broken away from the old geography and administered through completely and utterly separate entities which would not be allowed to use the county names.

By doing that, by freeing local and regional administration from the ancient county boundaries, we could build a rational structure from scratch instead of the perpetual tinkering.

It's now 60 years since the civil service has been leading successive governments by the nose into repeated reorganisations none of which has made much sense, always compromised by the continued blockage whereby notionally ancient medieval counties (but on repeatedly altered boundaries so they are not really the "original" counties at all), of a scale which means most of them are too big to be local but too small to be effective, and with boundaries which often cut through major conurbations, but even after these six decades we still haven't reached anything which is rational or accepted (or even understood) by most citizens.

The article gave no analysis and no big-picture of the English local government landscape or the history which I have tried here to expose.